“If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships streaming toward us on the horizon,” Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer consulting firm, said recently.

The term has also proliferated – roughly 303,000 Google results tonight – to the point where it’s straining credibility, like other overused metaphors involving cyberspace and international goings-on, nefarious or otherwise. A few points for consideration:

2. “Cyberwar,” “cyberespionage,” Internet-enabled crime, virus releases, and simple malfunctions can be difficult to distinguish from each other by their effects. Political actors schooled to think only in terms of “Pearl Harbors” (or “Munichs,” for that matter) may be predisposed to solutions which could be wasteful, or even counterproductive. A hypothetical: imagine the Cold War never ended, but turned even more tense. A new worm originates from inside Russia and disrupts U.S. air traffic systems. Is it the work of a bored college student? The prelude to an attack? In 1983, a Soviet air defense commander “made a serious but honest mistake” in the shootdown of a South Korean 747 due to conditions of tension and high alert, according to a CIA monograph. The point is that there’s a danger of escalation in any crisis, and while these conditions do not currently exist, metaphors like “digital Pearl Harbor” substitute predisposition for analysis.

3. As Bruce Schneier has pointed out, legitimate security concerns, once given a backdrop of “ships streaming towards us” or terrorism, tend to get washed out by calls for regulation that limit the productive use of technology and threaten privacy.

“The popularity of charlatanism and magic has increased amongst Arab satellite channels, which, in turn, has led to an increase in the number of charlatans. These individuals aim to give off an image of a pious sheikh who can solve individual problems. There are others who have a strong sense of persuasion that has been learnt throughout many years of experience. His/her viewers feel compelled to watch and listen as if they have hypnotized the words and become convinced of his/her abilities to solve their problems.”

3. The Pirate Bay goes on trial Monday. Wired’s Threat Level provides the details…suffice to say that the case has significant implications for cross-border copyright law, possibly raising more questions than answers. The operators of this BitTorrent tracking service have indicated that the service will live, regardless of the verdict, raising yet more questions about legal boundaries and enforceability.

Ethan Zuckerman delivered a brilliant presentation at the Berkman Center last week on “Mapping Globalization” – for the summary version, see the related post on Ethan’s blog). His talk discusses the significance of mapping flow across infrastructure to better understand where nominal and real connections meet, and, more importantly, where they don’t.

Also mentioned is the potential mapping of intent, something he’s so far been unable to find. This had me paying more attention to a blog post / Guardian op-ed this week by Bruce Schneier, who recapitulates his quite sensible position against government attempts to “ban, control, or disrupt” new communications infrastructure. The logic behind these attempts seems clear, when thinking through Zuckerman’s schema: despite the best privacy-eroding efforts, no government has yet found a method for mapping intent, and distinguishing deviations that might pose a security challenge to infrastructure.

One might even imagine a scale reflecting the balance between individual and government power in a society based on (a) the degree to which information regarding infrastructure is open and accessible, (b) the degree to which user access to information and communications infrastructure is private, and (c) the degree to which the availability or use of communications technologies are regulated, if not banned outright. Watching changes to such a scale over, say, the last decade – perhaps overlaid on a world map – could provide a fascinating glimpse into the impact of information technology on civil societies.

P.S. …speaking of, Slashdot is featuring an article on the pressure exerted by Nokia to pass a law possibly in violation of the Finnish Constitution’s privacy guarantees.

In December 2007 and January 2008, 56-year-old human rights activist Nguyen Hoaong Hai — who blogged under the pseudonym “Dieu Cay” — organized demonstrations in Ho Chi Minh City against the government’s permission of the Olympic torch to pass through Vietnam. The demonstrations protested Chinese occupation of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea — which Vietnam also claims. Within months, police arrested Nguyen on charges of tax evasion — a move widely seen as retaliation. “It’s pretty clear that what he was really thrown in jail for was for criticizing China’s claim over the Paracels,” says Bob Dietz, Asia program coordinator at the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. In December, an appeals court upheld Nguyen’s 30-month jail sentence.

The WashPost piece focuses on the potential role of Yahoo! and Google – per the new regulations, “Internet companies” are required to report to the government every six months, although the application of this to non-Vietnamese companies is unclear. But the possible role of China would seem to be more interesting here, especially considering the relationships China has effectively forged with companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft.

3. Third, there’s an interesting correlation between recent Chinese efforts to go after online pornographers and a line in the Vietnamese law banning “obscenity and debauchery” … regardless of whether or not it receives any technical support from abroad, it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to suspect that Vietnam is looking to China as a model for how to leverage the economic benefits of the Internet without sacrificing political control.

As reported in today’s WSJ, the United Arab Emirates is passing a new media law which threatens fines against journalists publishing information that “harms the economy.” Fake Plastic Souks has a good roundup of local media reaction, and points out that the new law seems to omit any reference to blogging, Twittering, YouTube, or any other online channel. But one doesn’t have to be a committed cynic to think that the UAE is likely to adopt a broad interpretation of “media,” given the precedent recently set in South Korea.

In fact, the parallel to South Korea might be more pronounced than a first glance would suggest. “Minerva” – offline, Park Dae Sung – was arrested for blogging about government moves to keep the won from falling against the dollar. As The National noted in December, the UAE’s Central Bank has kept interest rates higher than in the U.S. to contain inflation, despite a dollar peg, thanks to forward contracts betting on a devaluation of the dirham in 2009.

There’s a dilemma at work here. The crisis in the capital markets has a great deal to do with transparency and a lack of reliable information, particularly when it comes to asset quality and balance sheets. But the sheer quantity of information (which by definition will include misinformation and speculation), as well as the speed and ease by which it can be produced, may risk exacerbating the situation. Such would seem to be the fear of policy-makers, at least.

The AP goes on to report that the popular blogger had been a regular critic of the government’s handling of the economy and was self-taught in economics, although he lied online about his credentials.

I’m sure the Asian financial crisis of the late ’90s in still very much in policy-makers’ minds. If anything, the arrest seems to reflect a fear that there are fewer effective policy mechanisms than there were a decade ago.